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Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. On Friday, December 10th, 2010, minutes before midnight, a frantic man ran up to the bouncers outside a Houston, Texas nightclub begging for help. He lifted his shirt, uncovering blood. But the bouncers at the club blur didn't let him inside.
Seconds later, a second man appeared holding a knife. Before he could be let inside the club for safety, the second man stabbed him to death in front of dozens of witnesses. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 150, the story of Lydell Grant. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new exciting cases, conduct in-depth fact-based research, produce and edit this weekly show. As a thank you for supporting the show, you'll get early ad-free access to weekly episodes, shout-outs and episodes, priority on case suggestions, and access to weekly bonus episodes.
To support Forensic Tales, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales or simply click the link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive rating with a review. Now, let's get to this week's episode. Shortly before midnight on Friday, December 10th, 2010, a man ran up to the bouncers outside a Houston, Texas nightclub.
Club Blur was a bar in the Montrose District of Houston, Texas, the center of Houston's gay cultural life. And the man was 28-year-old Aaron Shehorn. As soon as Aaron reached the three bouncers standing in front of the club entrance, he said he needed help. He begged the bouncers to let him side the nightclub because someone was trying to kill him.
He lifted his shirt and exposed a bloody puncture wound on his chest that looked like a stab wound. Everyone near the nightclub entrance watched in horror as Aaron screamed for help. Before the bouncers could do anything, they saw a second, larger man holding a knife walking towards Aaron. Instead of letting Aaron inside the nightclub, they said he wasn't allowed inside. So Aaron had no choice but to start running.
He got a few hundred feet away to a nearby parking lot when the larger man holding the knife caught up to him. The man started beating and stabbing Aaron as almost a dozen witnesses near the club watched. Following the attack, the man calmly walked away, leaving Aaron bleeding on the ground. Paramedics transported Aaron to a local Houston hospital, but the doctors were too late.
Aaron Shehorn was pronounced dead on arrival. The 28-year-old had been beaten and stabbed to death. Aaron's murder quickly gained media attention. Within a few hours of the stabbing, the Houston Chronicle ran a story that read, "'Brutal killing could be a crime of passion.'" Homicide investigators for the Houston Police Department quickly got to work on the case.
They soon discovered that several witnesses at Club Blur saw the attack. Witnesses included three club bouncers, one bar staff member, three patrons of the club, and one passerby. None of the witnesses said they knew who Aaron or his attacker was, but they all claimed to have seen part of the murder take place.
Throughout the early morning hours of Saturday, December 10th, Houston police detectives collected statements from the witnesses, but none of their statements matched up. Some witnesses had a similar account of what happened, while others differed. But with so many eyewitnesses' accounts of Aaron's murder, Houston police officers were confident they had enough to catch this killer.
The witnesses provided the police with slightly different descriptions of Aaron's attacker. Some described him as African-American, between 6 feet and 6'6", and weighing between 200 and 260 pounds. Other witnesses said that he looked like he was in his 20s, while others said that he was older in an athletic shape. The witnesses described him as well-dressed and wearing an orange shirt.
Based on the witnesses' descriptions, Houston homicide detectives quickly got to work looking for a suspect. Their search took little time. Later that evening, Saturday, December 11th, the police received a tip. Dallin Wells, a barback who worked at the nightclub, called the police to report that he saw a man he thought looked like Aaron's attacker.
Dallin Wells told the police that he saw the man park his white Pontiac Grand Prix in front of the bar and walk away. He thought the man looked so much like the killer that he decided to walk to the car and write down the license plate and VIN number. Dallin Wells then provided the police with the numbers and told them they should look into the driver because he looked exactly like Aaron's attacker.
Houston detectives traced the car's VIN number and discovered the car was registered to 33-year-old Lydell Grant. When they ran a background report on Lydell, they uncovered more. Lydell Grant was no stranger to the Houston, Texas, Police Department. By his early 30s, he had a long rap sheet and was a convicted felon. So naturally, he became suspect number one in Aaron's murder.
Lydell Grant grew up in the Windsor Village neighborhood of Southwest Houston. It was a working class community with known gang activity. He grew up the middle child of five siblings and went by the nickname Dello. From a young age, he gravitated toward music, particularly hip-hop music. He looked up to artists like LL Cool J. He had dreams of growing up and becoming a successful hip-hop music artist.
But his dreams of making it in music came to a halt when Lydell became a teenager. Lydell started hanging out with the bad kids in school. He started getting into fights and smoking marijuana. By the time he turned 16, he was in big trouble. When Lydell was 16, he and a friend walked into a local dry cleaner and robbed the place at gunpoint. Although he was only a minor then, Lydell was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the armed robbery.
Lidell was housed in Harris County, Texas until he turned 18 and was then sent to prison. That's where he served his entire 10-year prison sentence and was released in 2004. When Lidell was released, he insisted that he had no idea his friend planned to rob the dry cleaners that day. Instead, he claimed he did nothing more than be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But Lidell's story seemed to fall on deaf ears.
After serving 10 years in prison for an armed robbery he said he didn't know about, Lydell tried moving on with his life. He knew he didn't want to go back to prison, so he tried to live his life on the straight and narrow. He went back home to pursue his career in hip-hop music, but despite his long prison term, he couldn't escape the system. Over the next six years, he was arrested on several drug charges and stealing credit cards.
Between 2004 and 2010, Lidell was in and out of Houston, Texas' jails. In December 2010, he found himself in deep trouble once again. As soon as Houston homicide detectives learned that the car belonged to Lidell and he was a convicted felon, they assembled a photo lineup and showed it to various witnesses who saw Aaron's murder.
Two bouncers at the nightclub that night, Andrew Vu and Armando Garza, identified Lydell Grant in the photo lineup as Aaron's killer. But the third bouncer, Luis Montoya, didn't recognize anyone. The police then showed the lineup to three more witnesses, two people who were outside the club and one passerby.
The two club patrons, Brittany and Cody Watkins, also identified Lidell. And so did the passerby, Roberto Ramirez. According to the Houston police, this meant that five out of the six people who looked at the photo lineup identified Lidell. Only one of them didn't. But this was all they needed to track Lidell Grant down.
On December 13, 2010, less than four days after the stabbing death of Aaron, Houston police officers pulled Lidell over and searched his car. Inside the car, they found a wig, ski mask, Halloween mask, and a knife in the trunk. Based on the eyewitness identification and the contents of Lidell's car, he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Immediately following his arrest, Lidell denied having anything to do with Aaron's murder. He even provided an alibi. One of Lidell's friends told the police that he was with Lidell the entire night Aaron was killed. It would have been impossible for Lidell to have done it because they were together all night. But Lidell's alibi wasn't enough to be released.
On top of eyewitness testimony that placed Lidell at the club that night, the police also said they had the forensic evidence to prove that Lidell was their suspect. After his arrest, the Houston Crime Lab tested scrapings underneath Aaron's fingernails collected at the autopsy.
If Aaron was involved in a struggle with his attacker, there was a good chance his killer left behind DNA underneath his fingernails. When the test results returned, the lab reported finding a mixture of DNA from at least two individuals.
According to the report, quote, at least one of them is male. Aaron Shehorn cannot be excluded as the contributor to the major components of this DNA mixture, end quote. This suggested that one of the male DNA profiles could have belonged to Aaron, but the second DNA profile was a mystery.
And according to the Houston Police Department, they believed that the second DNA profile could have belonged to Lydell Grant. And if it did, he was the killer. Support for this episode comes from The Foggy Dog. If you're looking for the perfect holiday gift for the pup who has it all, The Foggy Dog now offers personalization to make your gift even more special.
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Shop the Foggy Dog today at thefoggydog.com. And don't forget to use my promo code FORENSIC to get 15% off your order. That's thefoggydog.com, promo code FORENSIC to save 15% off your order. Texas prosecutors built their case against Lydell Grant for the next two years. Leading up to the trial, Lydell maintained his innocence.
But his defense wasn't as strong as the prosecution's. Before his trial began, Lidell went through three defense attorneys. His first attorney was hired and paid for by Lidell's younger brother. But a year before the trial, the attorney passed away from cancer. Lidell was then appointed a second defense attorney from the Harris County Public Defender's Office.
But like his first attorney, he also got sick with cancer and had to withdraw from the case. So again, Lidell was appointed another public defender. But despite his rotating attorneys, Lidell felt confident. He had a strong alibi that placed him nowhere near the nightclub where Aaron was killed. And he didn't believe the state had any solid forensic evidence against him.
The only thing the DNA testing from underneath Aaron's fingernails confirmed was that there was two male DNA profiles, and neither profile could definitively be linked to Lydell. But the one matter Lydell and his attorney worried about leading up to trial were the eyewitnesses. At least five people said they saw Lydell attacking Aaron that night, and all five witnesses pointed him out in a photo lineup.
The trial against Lidell began on December 3, 2012, two years after the murder. If convicted, he was looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. As a previously convicted felon, Texas prosecutors weren't settling for anything less. The prosecution's case relied almost solely on eyewitness testimony. Five eyewitnesses testified with a high degree of certainty that they saw Lidell attack Aaron.
Two of them said that they were, quote, positive it was Lydell. Two of them said they were, quote, 100% sure. And the other two said they were, quote, very sure. One of them testified that Lydell's face had been, quote, burned into his memory following the attack. The witness said they saw the murder from the second floor club patio about 25 feet above.
But eyewitness testimony wasn't the only proof the state claimed to have against Lidell. It might have been the strongest, but they also felt they had the forensic evidence. A forensic analysis from the Houston Police Department's crime lab, Priscilla Hill, testified for the prosecution. She testified about the two DNA profiles found underneath the victim's fingernails.
In her testimony, she said she could only find a full profile for one of them, and it belonged to the victim. But when it came to the second profile, she testified that she couldn't exclude Lydell Grant. This didn't mean it was Lydell's DNA. She simply testified to the fact that she couldn't exclude him. Lydell's public defender had a chance to object to the state's DNA expert, but they didn't.
So instead of calling a DNA expert, Lidell's attorney tried to compel the analysis to confirm that she couldn't associate Lidell with the DNA mixture. She just couldn't exclude him. Lidell's attorney only called one witness to testify, Raul Rodriguez. Raul Rodriguez testified that he was with Lidell the entire night of the murder.
He said that on the night of December 10th, he met Lidell in the parking lot of a different bar in town. They went bar hopping at several bars, but never stopped by the nightclub. Later, Rodriguez testified that the two of them ended up inside his hotel room where they stayed until morning. Rodriguez's testimony was the strongest piece of Lidell's defense. His testimony accounted for every move that night.
If Rodriguez had been with Lidell all night like he said he was, then it would have been impossible for Lidell to commit the murder and Rodriguez not know. And because the two of them met that night, the defense argued that Raul Rodriguez had no reason to lie or make up the alibi. Following a three-day trial, the case was handed over to the jury. Would the jury side with the state's eyewitnesses
or would they believe the defense's alibi? After only a handful of hours deliberating, the jury reached a verdict. They found Lidell guilty of first-degree murder on December 6, 2012. The jury voted to sentence him to a maximum of life in prison without the possibility of parole. 35-year-old Lidell Grant was destined to spend the rest of his life in prison for murder.
Immediately following his conviction, Lidell appealed his case. His first appeal was heard in 2014, but it was quickly denied. The appellate court upheld the trial court's decision and agreed that there was sufficient evidence in the case. After his 2014 appeal failed, Lidell contacted the Innocence Project of Texas, IPTX, for help with his case.
His appeal had been denied and he needed to figure out where to go next because Lidell believed in his heart that he was innocent. Lidell waited four years for the Innocent Project of Texas to agree to look at his case. In any given year, the organization receives anywhere from 50 to 100 letters every month from incarcerated people claiming innocence and asking them for help.
But with so many requests, they can only agree to take on some cases that they receive. So they have to go through each request and determine if there's something they can do. In spring 2018, the IPTX and Texas A&M School of Law students began reviewing Lidell's case. If the pro bono attorneys and law students felt there was something they could pursue, they would accept the case.
The students from Texas A&M who looked at Lidell's case belonged to an experimental clinic at the university. The clinic was designed for current law students to identify cases in which convicted defendants may have a viable post-conviction claim of actual innocence. This doesn't mean they look at every defendant's case who claims they're innocent. They look for cases that genuinely qualify as actual innocence.
Actual innocence can mean, number one, someone other than the accused committed the crime, or number two, a person was convicted of a crime that never occurred. In Lidell's case, the law students needed to determine if Lidell's case qualified as actual innocence because they believed he didn't commit the murder, as the police and eyewitnesses said.
By February 2019, the IPTX and the group of Texas A&M law students decided they would officially work on Liddell's case. They believed the state didn't present a strong enough case against Liddell because the DNA evidence was lacking. Although the state's expert found two male DNA profiles underneath the victim's fingernails,
The DNA couldn't be definitively linked to Lydell. He couldn't be included at the time of the murder, but he couldn't be excluded either. They also found evidence that the way the police conducted the photo lineup was biased, and the process unfairly pinpointed Lydell in the photos.
In February 2019, six years after his conviction, the IPTX filed a court motion to gain access to the pre-trial DNA case file from the Houston Forensic Science Center. They hired Dr. Angie Ambers, a forensic DNA expert and assistant director of the Henry Lee Institute of Forensic Science in West Haven, Connecticut, to look at the report.
Dr. Ambers reviewed the DNA mixture recovered from the victim's fingernails to determine if Lydell's DNA was potentially present in the mixture. After studying the DNA report, it took Dr. Ambers less than 30 minutes to determine that an unknown male profile was present, and the profile didn't belong to Lydell.
When the DNA mixture was originally tested in 2011, 26 alleles were present in the DNA mixture that weren't consistent with the DNA profile of the victim or Lydell. This meant that 26 foreign alleles were present in the DNA mixture. That amount should have been enough for the original DNA analysis to formally exclude Lydell as the contributor.
But instead of officially excluding him, she testified that she couldn't exclude him or include him. The difference in language may have caused the jury to believe that Lydell's DNA must have been in the mixture because she wasn't excluding him, when in reality, his DNA wasn't present at all.
Based on Dr. Amber's review of the original DNA report, she found there was an obvious foreign male contributor in the mixture. As soon as she reported her findings to the IPTX, they immediately contacted the Harris County District Attorney's Office Conviction Integrity Unit. They then sent the DNA report to Cybergenics Corporation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for analysis.
Cybergenetics is a Pittsburgh-based private company specializing in complex forensic and DNA testing. The Innocence Project of Texas wanted Cybergenetics to review the complete DNA report to see if they could also exclude Lydell. They also wanted to know if they could uncover whose foreign DNA was in the mixture.
In March 2019, CyberGenetics completed a probabilistic genotyping computer analysis of the original DNA report. Probabilistic genotyping uses statistical methods and mathematical algorithms in DNA profiling to help link a genetic sample. It's typically used to determine if a sample collected at a crime scene matches a person of interest in the case.
Probabilistic genotyping is especially useful when a DNA sample is tiny or includes a mixture of multiple individuals. In Lidell's case, probabilistic genotyping is an excellent tool because it can help identify the second individual in the mixed sample.
After CyberGenetics completed the probabilistic genotyping, they reported that the DNA of the victim, Aaron Sheehorn, and an unidentified person were found. But more importantly, they concluded that Lidell Grant's DNA was not found. This finding further excluded Lidell as the contributor to the sample.
Once it was discovered that it wasn't Lidell's DNA underneath the victim's fingernails, the Innocence Project of Texas sent the DNA profile to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. CODIS had over 14 million convicted offender DNA profiles at the time of their submittal.
About 4 million DNA profiles were from arrests, and more than 1 million DNA profiles were obtained from unsolved crimes. IPTX hoped that by running the DNA profile through CODIS, they could get a hit on the unknown profile. And that is exactly what happened.
The search of the CODA database found that the unidentified DNA profile from the fingernail scrapings was similar to the DNA profile of 41-year-old Jeremico Carter. So it was Jeremico Carter's DNA recovered from the murder victim's fingernails, not Lidell Grant's.
At the time of the murder, Jeremico Carter lived in Houston, Texas, and he had been previously arrested on drug-related charges within a few feet of where the murder occurred. He also closely physically resembles Lydell Grant, which could explain why eyewitnesses believed it was Lydell.
Besides the drug convictions, Carter also had a violent criminal history. He had been in and out of prison over the years for several violent offenses. Once the Innocence Project identified the contributor of the unknown DNA sample, they got to work on finding additional evidence to exonerate Lidell.
In June 2019, Mike Warr, executive director of the IPTX and Texas prosecutors argued that the Texas Department of Public Safety would conduct new DNA tests on the knife recovered from Liddell's car and the fingernail scrapings. About four weeks later, they got the test results back.
In July 2019, the Texas Department of Public Safety reported that Lidell's DNA could not be found in the mixture. Their tests confirmed the report from CyberGenetics. A few months after this finding, Lidell was released on bond on November 26, 2019. By this point, he had served seven years in prison for a murder he didn't commit.
Less than a month later, in December 2019, Carter was arrested in Atlanta, Georgia on other criminal charges. But as soon as Houston detectives heard about his arrest, they immediately flew to Atlanta to interview him while he was in police custody. During the interview, Carter confessed to stabbing and killing Aaron. But according to Carter, he killed him in self-defense.
He claimed the two got into an altercation in the street outside the nightclub that night, but he never intended to kill him. He only stabbed him because Aaron, the victim, was the aggressor. Carter also said Lydell Grant was not involved.
Following Carter's arrest and confession, Texas prosecutors and the IPTX filed a writ of habeas corpus to the trial court requesting that Lidell's murder conviction be vacated. The request was approved and sent to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. But getting Lidell's conviction overturned wasn't as easy as his defense hoped.
In 2020, the Texas Court of Appeals requested that the trial court provide affidavits from the witnesses who identified Lydell Grant at trial. The court also wanted photographs of Carter and a copy of the recorded interview with police during which Carter confessed.
The Innocence Project of Texas partnered with a psychology professor from the University of Arizona to review the trial transcripts and police reports. Based on her review, she found that the witness identifications were plagued with problems. These problems, quote, likely impaired the witness's ability to remember the attacker's face, end quote. Some of the issues included the short duration of their exposure to the attacker,
the eyewitnesses would have only seen the suspect for a moment or two. Another problem was that their attention was likely more focused on the knife the attacker was holding versus the attacker himself. There was also the issue that the eyewitnesses were probably scared and feared for their safety. And when someone is stressed or scared, their ability to accurately identify someone dramatically decreases.
Lidell Grant and Carter look very similar to each other. Both are African American males. They both have short and similar haircuts. They're compatible in weight and height. So side by side, both men might look very similar. And according to the psychology professor, these issues could explain why the eyewitnesses falsely identified Lidell instead of Carter.
This expert from the University of Arizona also reported that the photo lineups weren't conducted in a double-blind fashion and that all eyewitnesses received post-identification positive feedback that likely incorrectly influenced their confidence. In double-blind lineups, neither the eyewitnesses nor the police officers administering the lineup know which person is the suspect.
In Lidell's case, the police officer who administered the photo lineup already knew Lidell was the prime suspect. The Court of Appeals wanted signed affidavits from the eyewitnesses, but only one could be found, Andrew Vu. He was one of the nightclub bouncers that night. According to Andrew Vu, he didn't identify Lidell in the lineup at first. He told the police that he didn't see the guy in the lineup.
But when the police asked him to look around because the suspect was in there, he said he identified Lydell. In a statement reported by the Innocence Project, Andrew Vu said, quote, I picked Mr. Grant even though I did not really feel he was the guy. However, I talked to my co-workers afterwards and they were all sure Mr. Grant was the person. So I agreed.
Because my coworkers believed it was Mr. Grant, I thought I was the one making a mistake. End quote. In February 2021, Lidell's defense submitted an amended writ of habeas corpus to the Court of Criminal Appeals.
The amended petition said that Liddell's alibi witness, Raul Rodriguez, signed an affidavit stating that he maintained he was with Liddell the entire night the murder took place and that he couldn't have committed it without him knowing.
Besides Rodriguez's affidavit, Lidell's cell phone records were submitted to the Court of Criminal Appeals, and the records confirmed there was no connection between Lidell and Carter or Lidell and the victim. It took the Court of Appeals 16 months to review Lidell's case, but the wait was worth it. On May 19, 2021, the Court of Appeals granted the petition and officially vacated Lidell's conviction.
In the court ruling, they said, quote, the entirety of the record now supports the agreed recommendation to grant actual innocence relief, end quote. After almost a decade, Lydell Grant was legally exonerated of a murder he always claimed he never committed.
A week after the court vacated the conviction, the prosecution dismissed the case on May 27, 2021. And on August 3, Liddell received almost $700,000 in state compensation for his wrongful conviction. Murder charges against Carter are still pending in Texas.
Lydell Grant was sentenced to life in prison because eyewitnesses falsely identified him and the forensic evidence couldn't definitively exclude him. It took almost a decade for advancements in DNA testing and the use of probabilistic genotyping to finally identify the real killer. To share your thoughts on Lydell Grant's story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook.
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Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.
